Václav Benda (August 8, 1946, Prague – June 2, 1999) was a Czech Roman Catholic activist and intellectual, and mathematician. Under Communist rule in Czechoslovakia, Benda and his wife were rare in being believings Christians among the leadership of the anti-communist dissident organization Charter 77. After the Velvet Revolution, Benda became the head of an organization charged with investigating the former Czechoslovakian secret police and their many informants. The ideas expressed in Benda's iconic essay A Parallel Polis influenced the thought of other dissidents like Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa. Those same ideas have been spread in recent years by American Paleoconservative writer Rod Dreher. The first English translation of Benda's collected samizdat essays was published by St. Augustine's Press in 2017. Life The son of a lawyer, Benda was president of the Students' Academic Council and obtained a doctorate of Philosophy at Charles University in Prague at age 24. His academic career ended when he refused to join the Communist Party in the early 1970s. As a result of his political activities he experienced harassment from the government and economic exclusion, being forced to work for brief periods in a large number of different jobs. With Benda and his wife Kamila's decision during the Soviet-led invasion of August 1968 not to flee the country, he remained at Charles University. Benda completed his doctorate in theoretical cybernetics in 1975, published works on philosophy and mathematics, and then worked as a computer programmer. Benda was active in the dissident movement against the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, and in 1977 became a signatory to Charter 77. In 1977, he also wrote a short samizdat essay called "Parallel Polis" (), calling for his fellow dissidents to abandon hope that the repressive social, economic and political institutions in Czechoslovakia could be changed by protest. Instead, Benda called for new "parallel institutions" to be created, which would be more responsive to human needs and may someday replace the existing corrupt institutions. He argued that as the communist state would drain any efforts at reform, it was better to start new ones than expend energy fighting old ones. The essay was translated into English in 1978. Benda's role as a spokesman for Charter 77 resulted in him being arrested in May 1979 and charged with subverting the state, for which he was imprisoned until 1983. After his release he resumed his role as spokesman. He was also